Wanna get even more upset that you already are? Sad to say, it’s not too hard.
Go over and read Andrew Sullivan’s site. Read the comments that the President of the United States made about how we’re going to get a better Gulf Coast out of this mess. Why a better Gulf Coast? Because, the president said, folks who have flood insurance to protect their homes – and pay to restore those homes – will be able to build nicer homes. He wasn’t that explicit, of course. And he was making a “joke.” And, to add insult to injury, he’s talking about? Sen. Trent Lott. You know, the guy who wanted to “make a 100-year-old man feel good” by endorsing Sen. Strom Thurmond’s policies on racial segregation. Seems the president is counting on Sen. Lott to build a nicer front porch than the he had before Katrina rolled through town.
That’s the kind of unthinking banter that sets a tone for even dumber – and more dangerous – conversations. A friend – one who has the patience I don’t to listen to talk radio – says there’s a ‘racially veiled” conversation going on about why so many New Yorkers were heroes after 9/11 and so many New Orleans residents are looters.
Huh? There was looting after 9/11. It was reported, too by William Langewiesche in The Atlantic Monthly. He wrote about stacks of blue jeans – lifted from the retail shops below the World Trade Center – found sitting in fire trucks.
His account was greeted with outrage. The firefighters of New York, led by the widow of biologist and media darling Stephen Jay Gould shouted Langewiesche down.
The nice hardworking, near starving black folks of New Orleans don’t have any a well-connected widow to speak for them. So lots of us white folks are sitting and “wondering” why New Orlean is “filled” with looters and New York — and its white, unionized fire fighters — are all shining heroes.
Do you think it’s the white horses they road in on?